The end of the year is a time to celebrate and reflect, but there are issues that made 2022 exhausting for many people. 

Breanna Dietrich, who lives in West Virginia, spent weeks searching for baby formula for her infant daughter when many shelves were bare nationwide. 

“Knowing where we were at, it still breaks my heart every day," she said.

Dietrich started a social media group earlier this year. It allowed people to post pictures of places they were finding the baby formula.

The formula shortage has improved since the middle of the year, but it's not over.

It's estimated roughly 87% of formula is now in stock.

However, nearly a third of adults with newborns at home said in a recent U.S. Census survey they’re still struggling to find what they need. Formula makers expect some shortages to continue until the spring.

Like the difficulty of finding the right baby formula, skyrocketing food prices is not an issue that will end in 2023.

Caterer Jessica Walks First said the ingredients she uses for her business doubled this year.

“They’ve gotten better in some aspects and in some aspects, they are still the same," she said.

Walks First's catering business specializes in Native American food. Her menu requires specific ingredients to be authentic, like wild rice, which she often buys from native growers on reservations.

In the fall, food and shipping costs were so high, she made 500-mile round trips herself, multiple times a month, to pick up the ingredients herself. Now, as 2022 comes to a close, she says she's in a better place.

“I’m not driving as much. I did find a good source for my wild rice where it now gets shipped to my house in 50-pound bags, so I have that going for me, which saves me 3-4 rides a month," Walks First said.

The USDA expects food prices to continue to rise in 2023 but not at the same rate as in 2022.

Walks First and Dietrich both are hopeful as another new year approaches.

“We get a little better back to the old normalcy," Dietrich said.

“I don’t do this as a job," Walk First stated. "This isn’t work for me. This is my passion, and my life dream, and I give it all I got."

In recent years, there's been a growing movement of Native Americans reclaiming land that historians say the government stole from tribes in the early 1900s. Historians say the birth of this movement was a 1969 occupation on the island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.

Surrounded by strong currents and cold water, the island of Alcatraz was designed to imprison some of the country's most notorious criminals. However, the penitentiary shut down in 1963. Six years later in 1969, Eloy Martinez stepped foot on the island to participate in a Native American Occupation. It's now a key part of the island's history.

Historians say Native Americans chose to take the island because of an 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie that allows the indigenous people to occupy land abandoned by the federal government. Yale professor of American Studies Ned Blackhawk says Native Americans were demanding reparations for what had been taken from them. Blackhawk is a member of the Te-Moak Western Shoshone tribe and the author of The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.

He says the federal government had passed laws in the late 1940s and early 1950s that called for tribal nations to be terminated. It was known as the era of assimilation.

"The activists are trying to think through how do we articulate what we want in relationship to these current government policies, as well as the future of an Indian world that we would like to inhabit," Blackhawk said.

Today, Martinez visits often. His hope is that the occupation is never forgotten. He points out the welcome sign that was painted by Native Americans soon after they arrived on the island.

He says nostalgic feelings flood back every time he returns.

"Free, it was free, happy," Martinez said. "It was exciting because people were doing things, you know, I mean, it was fresh. Nothing, nothing like that had ever happened anywhere else."

He often returns with his good friend, Ilka Hartmann. She's a photographer who was born in Germany during World War II. She says the genocide Native Americans faced during the Gold Rush in the US reminded her of genocide during WWII, igniting her passion to stand up for marginalized communities.

"I was trying to take pictures of the Indians here having taken this land, and I was trying to show them with their pride and their success," Hartmann said.

She captured dozens of photos during the 19-month occupation. They are now on display at an exhibit on the island that she hopes becomes permanent. Other photographers at the exhibit include Brooks Townes and Alan Copeland.

"I remember hearing all the sounds here, the beautiful sounds of the riots that were loose everywhere," Hartmann said. "And it was like a sing-song everywhere. It really, really impressed me. And there were only here and there a few people, so it was very desolate."

Only about 89 Indigenous men, women, and children seized the land, but as Blackhawk states, they also seized the nation's attention.

"And for the first time, really in the 20th Century, Native Americans land literally on the front pages of the national headlines and newspapers," Blackhawk said.

"It was right there," Martinez said. "You had to look at it."

Blackhawk says the occupation sparked a movement of change in the years that followed.

"The occupation of Alcatraz was part of an era that launched a whole range of Native American, what are known as self-determination efforts in education, in the arts, in gaming or economic development, in land management," Blackhawk said.

"Termination policies were ended, the Indian Child Welfare Acts was reenacted, religious acts reenacted, gravesite protection, all that was enacted," Martinez said. "And that would've never happened if Alcatraz hadn't happened."

Blackhawk, Martinez and Hartmann all mention the federal government also returned millions of acres of land back to the tribes in the years that followed.

"45,000 acres of land to the Taos Blue Lake in New Mexico," Hartmann said. "And about 160,000 acres of land to Warm Spring Oregon tribe."

Sacred land is still being returned to Native tribes today. A revolution they say started with the Alcatraz occupation.

 

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — In a country with so much diversity, around 8.75 million people identify, at least partially, as American Indian or Alaska Native.

In Minnesota, a state with more than 100,000 of those residents, the Dakota people have the largest presence.

Shelley Buck, who has devoted her life to her culture and tribe, serves as the president of Friends of the Falls. She is pushing to transform the heart of Minneapolis' Central Riverfront into an iconic destination honoring Indigenous history.

Friends of the Falls has been working with the City of Minneapolis, the Minneapolis Park Board and Dakota nations to possibly reassume ownership of a historic stretch of the city's downtown riverfront that was traditionally a Dakota sacred site.

"I want it to be a place of healing, connecting and reconnecting," Buck said. "A place for education where we can educate the people about things they weren't taught growing up and also that community building."

Dakota people went to Owámniyomni, meaning turbulent waters, for ceremony and women traveled to Spirit Island to give birth. Both sites have since experienced extensive damage and destruction.

"Friends of the Falls did a ton of work to arrive at a vision for what this place could ultimately be, that would highlight it in a way that would set us apart as a city and sets this particular destination apart from anything else you'll find in the rest of the country," said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.

Frey says acknowledgment of the lost history is one part of the process. He said another part is rectifying broken treaties.

"This is an opportunity for us to use that same legal system that did wrong to do right," Frey said.

Buck points out it's rare for people to want to help tribes get their land back.

"And saying, 'Here you go, it's your project. It needs to be native-led and native-focused, have at it.' You never hear about that," Buck said.

This project began with non-native people. People like Kjersti Duval, the CEO of Duval Companies, which is a real estate development and policy solutions company, first helped to protect the site.

"I was really one of those folks that were there at the beginning," Duval said. "The initial push was to prevent the site from further industrialization."

Quickly, native leaders were brought on board. One of the biggest hurdles is working to change land ownership.

"It has been extremely difficult to move this very small piece of land from federal ownership to local ownership. Like I said, seven years, it should be easier," Duval said.

These leaders want their work to be encouraging and emulated in other parts of the country.

"Great opportunity to touch people to have something that was once invisible become very visible, become a learning opportunity," Duval said.

"I'm excited for this to be a one-of-a-kind and really something that can help other states work towards," Buck said.

Five Native American women have disappeared or been killed along California's rugged Lost Coast in the past 18 months.

The crisis has spurred the Yurok Tribe to issue an emergency declaration and brought increased urgency to efforts to build the first database of such cases in California. The tribe also is working to gain supervision over foster care and build an indigenous justice system that would ultimately handle all but the most serious felonies.

Tribal officials say reclaiming sovereignty over such systems is the only way to end the cycle of loss that's taken the greatest toll on their women.

Blythe George, a Yurok tribal member also works on a project that documents the missing and said, “I came to this issue as both a researcher and a learner, but just in this last year, I knew three of the women who have gone missing or were murdered — and we shared so much in common.” George said, “You can’t help but see yourself in those people.”

One of the missing is 33-year-old Emmilee Risling who disappeared after she was last seen walking across a bridge in a remote part of the Yurok Reservation.

Reporting problems have made the true number of missing indigenous persons unknown, according to a 2021 U.S. Government Accountability Office report.

Native women are said to face murder rates that are nearly three times those of white women overall, and up to 10 times that of the national average in many locations. Just in California, the Yurok Tribe and the Sovereign Bodies Institute found 18 cases of missing or murdered Native American women in the past year or so.

November is Native American Heritage Month, a time to celebrate the rich and diverse culture, history and tradition of the hundreds of Native American tribes in the U.S.

"Native Americans have a way of honoring life and honoring the things that provide us life that are natural in this world," said Amber Saunders from the Tuscarora Tribe of North Carolina.

Every dance is an expression, a language in itself and the regalia they wear is a personal story.

Juanita Zermeno, of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, said, "It's not a costume. A costume is something you wear when you're pretending. We're not. This is us."

The drums you often hear in their songs represent a heartbeat.

"The heartbeat is the first thing that you hear in your mother's womb," Saunders said.

There are more than 500 tribes in the United States.

"We want people to know we are very much a thriving people and we practice our customs and our traditions, and we still have ways that we celebrate our culture and teach to younger generations and the public," Saunders said.

"If I know where we're coming from if I know you're coming from we can respect each other," Zermeno said.

Juanita Zermeno met her husband, Thomas Zermeno, in Texas. He is a Vietnam veteran.

As Thomas Zermeno laughed and smiled, he said, "It's one of those things. You just click, that's the one."

"Here we are 50 years later. So, we did something right!" Juanita Zermeno said.

The couple encourages people to look into their heritage.

"We're trying to get our grandkids to do the same thing. We want to let them know who their grandparents are," Thomas Zermeno said.

"I like to think we're productive citizens of a land that we love and we have fought for, from the very beginning," Juanita Zermeno said.

The Florida Indian Heritage Association in St. Lucie County runs two of the largest Pow Wows in Florida.

Watch the full story in the video above.